In Her Absence by Antonio Muñoz Molina Read Free Book Online

N. who began to emerge after the first trips to Madrid, the one who years later would shine forth in all his glory in the fashionable bars of Jaén, was an eccentric andrather effeminate diva, shamelessly addicted to the blandishments of power and money, dressed like a fashion model, but with the hard, ancient features of a man of the countryside, the faint shadow of a rural beard contrasting with the languid pallor that at the time was de rigueur. He began assembling an entourage of young disciples who constituted a vague art or design movement they called La Factory. They gave each other female nicknames and celebrated and repeated anything he said as if they were a kind of brainwashed sect, and indeed more than once they reminded Blanca of a band of Hare Krishnas. They were the ones who started calling him Jimmy N. and imitating his mannerisms and way of dressing, though it sometimes seemed as if he were imitating them which, given his age, was ridiculous in a way that was painfully visible even to Blanca’s not always wide-open eyes. Now he declared himself a fan of cartoons and the most banal pop music hits, he who, only a little while before, would shut himself in his studio every morning to paint to the sound of blaring jazz, just like hishero, Jackson Pollock. During his black hours of discouragement, he’d often told Blanca that he’d rather burn his paintings or throw them on a garbage dump than humiliate himself by giving in to the demands of commercial art galleries, but now he liked to repeat a line that was very quickly copied and popularized by his disciples although, as Blanca discovered some time later, it hadn’t even originated with him: “Time to wise up, Blanquita: the avant-garde is the marketplace.”
    On one of his first visits back from Madrid after setting up a studio there, Blanca overcame the cowardice of her love to ask him straight out whether he had another girlfriend. Naranjo, or rather Jimmy N., swore he didn’t and seemed so hurt by her suspicions that he made her feel unfair, guilty, and contemptible. Without noticing how, she went from accuser to accused; instead of asking him for explanations she was begging his forgiveness. They managed to patch things up, and spent one more night of passion together that was almost like old times, except now they neededsome help from cocaine, which was beginning to replace hashish on the cultural scale of prestige. It was a stimulant, not a relaxant; it promoted a speediness that was in keeping with the era; it was clean, smoke-free, residue-free, and instantaneous; it was said to arouse prodigious sexual desire; and furthermore, it did not create addiction, and had nothing to do with the laid-back hippy aura of hashish or the sordid manginess of heroin.…
    They spent that weekend together and Naranjo left on Sunday night aboard the express train to Madrid. A few minutes before the train left, as they were saying good-bye, he winked at her and suggested in a low voice that they visit the train’s restroom together. For a moment Blanca was flattered and surprised, thinking he might want to have a quick, wild fuck—a daring and almost impossible plan in that tiny space. But instead Naranjo asked her for the mirror she carried in her purse and made a couple of lines of cocaine on it with a recently acquired credit card. “If it were a Visa Gold card,the coke would taste even better,” he said, passing his index finger along the edge of the card, then bringing it greedily to his mouth and extracting every last trace of pleasure out of the cocaine by rubbing it into his gums, his wide country-boy gums, as hard to conceal as the dark shadow of his beard or the Jaén accent that rose unchecked through the string of fashionable words, feminine diminutives, and pseudo-English terminology that threaded across his campy monologues.
    When Blanca told him these stories, Mario felt as if they had happened in a different world from the one he knew, in some